Age does not count: resilience of quantity processing in healthy ageing

Quantity skills have been extensively studied in terms of their development and pathological decline. Recently, numerosity discrimination (i.e., how many items are in a set) has been shown to be resilient to healthy ageing despite relying on inhibitory skills, but whether processing continuous quantities such as time and space is equally well-maintained in ageing participants is not known. Life-long exposure to quantity-related problems may progressively refine proficiency in quantity tasks, or alternatively quantity skills may decline with age. In addition, is not known whether the tight relationship between quantity dimensions typically shown in their interactions is preserved in ageing. To address these questions, two experimental paradigms were used in 38 younger and 32 older healthy adults who showed typical age-related decline in attention, executive function and memory tasks. In both groups we first assessed time and space discrimination independently using a two-choice task (i.e., “Which of two horizontal lines is longer in duration or extension?”), and found that time and space processing were equally accurate in younger and older participants. In a second paradigm, we assessed the relation between different quantity dimensions which were presented as a dynamic pattern of dots independently changing in duration, spatial extension and numerosity. Younger and older participants again showed a similar profile of interaction between number, cumulative area and duration, although older adults showed a greater sensitivity to task-irrelevant information than younger adults in the cumulative area task but lower sensitivity in the duration task. Continuous quantity processing seems therefore resilient to ageing similar to numerosity and to other non-quantity skills like vocabulary or implicit memory; however, ageing might differentially affect different quantity dimensions

Modern day monitoring and control challenges outlined on an industrial-scale benchmark fermentation process

This paper outlines real-world control challenges faced by modern-day biopharmaceutical facilities through the extension of a previously developed industrial-scale penicillin fermentation simulation (IndPenSim). The extensions include the addition of a simulated Raman spectroscopy device for the purpose of developing, evaluating and implementation of advanced and innovative control solutions applicable to biotechnology facilities. IndPenSim can be operated in fixed or operator controlled mode and generates all the available on-line, off-line and Raman spectra for each batch. The capabilities of IndPenSim were initially demonstrated through the implementation of a QbD methodology utilising the three stages of the PAT framework. Furthermore, IndPenSim evaluated a fault detection algorithm to detect process faults occurring on different batches recorded throughout a yearly campaign. The simulator and all data presented here are available to download at www.industrialpenicillinsimulation.com and acts as a benchmark for researchers to analyse, improve and optimise the current control strategy implemented on this facility. Additionally, a highly valuable data resource containing 100 batches with all available process and Raman spectroscopy measurements is freely available to download. This data is highly suitable for the development of big data analytics, machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms applicable to the biopharmaceutical industry