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In this article we study how the frequency of book-reading - a form of legitimate culture - develops in the period from adolescence to young adulthood and how it is influenced by parents' education, parental reading socialization climate, school and their interactions. In disentangling parental and educational effects we contribute to the cultural reproduction-cultural mobility debate. We use multi-actor panel data on three cohorts of Dutch secondary school students (and their parents) who took part in a classroom survey between the ages of 14 and 17, and who participated in at least one of the follow-up surveys two, four and six years later. We find that the amount of book-reading is more strongly associated with education than with parents' reading socialization. The influence of parents increases slightly in the period from adolescence to young adulthood. Differences in reading behaviour between students of different educational programmes increase during secondary education, but decrease in the period after secondary schooling. The transition to tertiary education hardly affects the frequency of reading. Overall, the results are more in line with the cultural reproduction model than with the cultural mobility model. © The Author(s) 2012.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, life in advanced societies has been individualized, with the individual seen as the architect of his or her own life, creating his or her own destiny, and with the future being the result of personal choices, preferences and capacities. This view is not uncontested, though, as many continue to stress the importance of the social, cultural and economic origins of individuals in understanding life course choices. The central question of this paper is to what extent the socio-economic origin of adolescents influences their expectations about their future life course, in the domains both of work and education, and in their family life. This question is studied using a data set in which 60 schools throughout the Netherlands have participated. More than 1,500 adolescents, aged 14–17 years, were interviewed about their future plans, expectations and life ambitions. In addition, their parents were questioned on the future plans of their child., Since the second half of the twentieth century, life in advanced societies has been individualized, with the individual seen as the architect of his or her own life, creating his or her own destiny, and with the future being the result of personal choices, preferences and capacities. This view is not uncontested, though, as many continue to stress the importance of the social, cultural and economic origins of individuals in understanding life course choices. The central question of this paper is to what extent the socio-economic origin of adolescents influences their expectations about their future life course, in the domains both of work and education, and in their family life. This question is studied using a data set in which 60 schools throughout the Netherlands have participated. More than 1,500 adolescents, aged 14–17 years, were interviewed about their future plans, expectations and life ambitions. In addition, their parents were questioned on the future plans of their child.

We investigated how the microstructure of relevant white matter connections is associated with cortical responsivity and working memory (WM) performance by collecting diffusion tensor imaging and verbal WM functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 29 young adults. We measured cortical responsivity within the frontoparietal WM network as the difference in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal between 3-back and 1-back conditions. Fractional anisotropy served as an index of the integrity of the superior longitudinal fasciculi (SLF), which connect frontal and posterior regions. We found that SLF integrity is associated with better 3-back performance and greater task-related BOLD responsivity. In addition, BOLD responsivity in right premotor cortex reliably mediated the effects of SLF integrity on 3-back performance but did not uniquely predict 3-back performance after controlling for individual differences in SLF integrity. Our results suggest that task-related adjustments of local gray matter processing are conditioned by the properties of anatomical connections between relevant cortical regions. We suggest that the microarchitecture of white matter tracts influences the speed of signal transduction along axons. This in turn may affect signal summation at neural dendrites, action potential firing, and the resulting BOLD signal change and responsivity.