Children identified for classroom-based math support show altered resting-state connectivity in parietal brain regions

Approximately 25% of school-age children experience mathematics difficulties (MD). Mathematics skills have been correlated with resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between parietal brain regions, including the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the angular gyrus (AG), and a fronto-parietal network. However, the patterns of rsFC in children with MD remain less clear. This study conducted a seed-to-voxel analysis contrasting the rsFC profiles of 46 1st graders with MD (mean age = 6.95, sd = 0.34) and 60 1st graders with typical achievement (mean age = 7.08, sd = 0.38) in subdivisions of the intraparietal sulcus (hIP1, hIP2, and hIP3) and the angular gyrus (PGa, and PGp), bilaterally. Results suggested a pattern of hyperconnectivity between the right hIP2 and the left hippocampus and hypoconnectivity between the right PGa and the right ventral occipito-temporal cortex in children with MD. A multivariate classification analysis based on the rsFC maps extracted from the IPS and AG subdivisions indicated that a support-vector machine classifier distinguished between groups with accuracy above chance, particularly based on the rsFC of the left hIP1, the right hIP3, and the left PGp. These findings suggest atypical rsFC in the IPS and the AG in MD, with patterns of both hyper- and hypoconnectivity.