News from France. CIRAD Pineapple genebank database online

As a result of years of collection and germplasm exchange, and of an EU-funded project in which institutions from Brazil France and Venezuela collaborated, CIRAD has gathered hundreds of pineapple cultivars and species of the genus Ananas an wide collection of over 600 accessions has been established in Martinique, FWI, at the CIRAD research centre. This collectio includes a wide range of genotypes from many geographic origins, and is presently the most diverse in existence. All accessio the genebank have been evaluated using common methods for the characterization and evaluation of pineapple germplasm. As tool to promote information exchange and germplasm utilisation, CIRAD developed a database built on a standardised format. However, the database and its valuable information were not easily accessible to anyone. The development of a joint CIRAD-INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) project to build a Tropical Plants Biological Resources Centr (CRB) of the French West Indies made it possible to develop a web portal and give open access to the database directly on the internet. This website makes it possible to get information on cultivated plants conserved by CIRAD and INRA in Guadeloupe Martinique: sugarcane, bananas, yam, perennial fruit crops, flowers and pineapple. Eventually, the portal will be trilingual: French, English and Spanish. The Tropical Plants Biological Resources Centre of the French West Indies portal is currently accessible though not all features have been implemented. Access to the portal is at http://collections.antilles.inra.fr/BRCPortal/initHome.do. (Texte intégral

Are portrait artists superior face recognizers? Limited impact of adult experience on face recognition ability.

Across two studies, we asked whether extensive experience in portrait art is associated with face recognition ability. In Study 1, 64 students completed a standardized face recognition test before and after completing a year-long art course that included substantial portraiture training. We found no evidence of an improvement in face recognition after training over and above what would be expected by practice alone. In Study 2, we investigated the possibility that more extensive experience might be needed for such advantages to emerge, by testing a cohort of expert portrait artists (N = 28), all of whom had many years of experience. In addition to memory for faces, we also explored memory for abstract art and for words in a paired-associate recognition test. The expert portrait artists performed similarly to a large, normative comparison sample on memory for faces and words, but showed a small advantage for abstract art. Taken together, our results converge with existing literature to suggest that there is relatively little plasticity in face recognition in adulthood, at which point our substantial everyday experience with faces may have pushed us to the limits of our capabilities

The effects of allowing a second sequential lineup lap on choosing and probative value.

When presented with a sequential lineup, witnesses see each member of the lineup individually, essentially making a yes/no decision for each person shown. An important policy question is whether witnesses should be allowed to see an additional lap of a sequential lineup. We investigated the impact of a second lap on eyewitness decision-making and on the probative value of suspect identifications. We recruited a large community sample of participants (N = 393), each of whom viewed a target person before seeing a sequential lineup that did or did not include the target. A second lap was either required or optional. The group of participants who accepted the second lap were less able to discriminate between the target and the fillers and responded more conservatively in lap 1 than the group of witnesses who declined the second lap. Responding became more lenient from lap 1 to lap 2. Of the participants who saw a second lap, roughly 40% changed their response, most frequently from a non-identification to an identification. Both culprit identifications and filler identifications increased from lap 1 to lap 2. The probative value of suspect identifications was not significantly different whether witnesses were allowed two laps or one. However, the observed effects may be moderated by a number of system and estimator variables. Further, even small changes in probative value can have very different consequences depending upon the target-absent base rate