Gaze-following behaviour is considered crucial for social interactions which are influenced by social similarity. We investigated whether the degree of similarity, as indicated by the perceived age of another person, can modulate gaze following. Participants of three different age-groups (18-25; 35-45; over 65) performed an eye movement (a saccade) towards an instructed target while ignoring the gaze-shift of distracters of different age-ranges (6-10; 18-25; 35-45; over 70). The results show that gaze following was modulated by the distracter face age only for young adults. Particularly, the over 70 year-old distracters exerted the least interference effect. The distracters of a similar age-range as the young adults (18-25; 35-45) had the most effect, indicating a blurred own-age bias (OAB) only for the young age group. These findings suggest that face age can modulate gaze following, but this modulation could be due to factors other than just OAB (e.g., familiarity).

It is well known that the observation of graspable objects recruits the same motor representations involved in their actual manipulation. Recent evidence suggests that the presentation of nouns referring to graspable objects may exert similar effects. So far, however, it is not clear to what extent the modulation of the motor system during object observation overlaps with that related to noun processing. To address this issue, 2 behavioral experiments were carried out using a go-no go paradigm. Healthy participants were presented with photos and nouns of graspable and non-graspable natural objects. Also scrambled images and pseudowords obtained from the original stimuli were used. At a go-signal onset (150 ms after stimulus presentation) participants had to press a key when the stimulus referred to a real object, using their right (Experiment 1) or left (Experiment 2) hand, and refrain from responding when a scrambled image or a pseudoword was presented. Slower responses were found for both photos and nouns of graspable objects as compared to non-graspable objects, independent of the responding hand. These findings suggest that processing seen graspable objects and written nouns referring to graspable objects similarly modulates the motor system.

Objective: The aim of our study was to investigate which text-background (TB) color combinations improve legibility and pleasantness of texts either presented on a computer screen or projected on a...