The aim was to investigate the association of parental education at birth with cognitive ability in childhood and young adulthood and determine, whether functional connectivity of the salience network underlies this association. We studied participants of the Czech arm of the European Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood who underwent assessment of their cognitive ability at age 8 (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) and 28/29 years (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) and measurement with resting state functional MRI at age 23/24. We estimated the associations of parental education with cognitive ability and functional connectivity between the seeds in the salience network and other voxels in the brain. We found that lower education of both mothers and fathers was associated with lower verbal IQ, performance IQ and full-scale IQ of the offspring at age 8. Only mother´s education was associated with performance IQ at age 28/29. Lower mother´s education correlated with greater functional connectivity between the right rostral prefrontal cortex and a cluster of voxels in the occipital cortex, which, in turn, was associated with lower performance IQ at age 28/29. We conclude that the impact of parental education, particularly father´s, on offspring´s cognitive ability weakens during the lifecourse. Functional connectivity between the right rostral prefrontal cortex and occipital cortex may be a biomarker underlying the transmission of mother´s education on performance IQ of their offspring.

2nd Faculty of Medicine Charles University Prague 150 06 Prague 5 Czech Republic

3rd Faculty of Medicine Charles University Prague 100 00 Prague 10 Czech Republic

Brain and Mind Research Central European Institute of Technology Masaryk University 625 00 Brno Czech Republic

Centre of Clinical Neuroscience Department of Neurology 1st Faculty of Medicine General University Hospital Charles University Prague 128 21 Prague 2 Czech Republic

Faculty of Humanities Charles University Prague 182 00 Prague 8 Czech Republic

National Institute of Mental Health 250 67 Klecany Czech Republic

RECETOX Faculty of Science Masaryk University 611 37 Brno Czech Republic

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