10 - Intergenerational Neuroimaging as a New Cognitive Neuroscience Paradigm

Parents have a large influence on offspring’s brain and cognitive development. The Intergenerational Multiple Deficit Model affords integration of parental influences, whether genetic (G) or environmental (E), to explain individual differences in cognitive function or disorders. Further, it has recently been suggested that most complex traits show intergenerational sex-specific transmission patterns, which could help uncover biological pathways of transmission. Macro-circuits using imaging may be an ideal target for investigations of intergenerational effects, where key causes may converge in ways that lead to complex phenotypes. I will present one line of research in our lab and findings from our NIH-funded projects to illustrate this approach and how we study relationships and dissociation between G and E effects using reading and dyslexia as examples.