Left: relation between the Dn(4000) index and the W2−W3 color measured from the sample of 21 065 bright nearby galaxies (see text for the selection criteria). For each bin in W2−W3, the large black dots denote the mean value and dispersion of the best Gaussian fit to the Dn(4000) distributions. Each spectroscopic class is highlighted with a color: red for lineless galaxies, black for LINERs, green for Seyferts, and blue for star-forming galaxies. The solid line represents the result of a toy model where a fixed fraction of a blue light component of increasing strength is reprocessed into MIR radiation. Right: simulated Dn(4000) versus W2−W3 tracks obtained by adding a power-law component of increasing strength with a spectral index increasing from 0 (green) to 1 (cyan) with a step of 0.25 to the SED of a quiescent galaxy. Within each track we label the ratios of 0, 0.1, 0.3, 1, 3, and 10 between the jet and galactic components. The black lines trace the iso-density contours of the distribution shown in the left panel; the red lines show the iso-densities contours for the objects with all lines rest frame EW< 5 Å.