I am currently conducting an experiment where a subject is shown a series of photographs of various objects. Each photo contains a single object. Before showing the photograph, a screen with a text indicating the name of the object is shown briefly. The objective is to analyze the eye-fixations that occur as subjects view the objects.
This is a free-viewing task, i.e. the subjects are asked to gaze at the pictures without explicitly searching for any attribute in particular. Typically, a bottom-up mechanism is thought to be active for such situations. Since I show the name of the object before showing its picture, most likely, I am priming the subject's visual system. Does this manner of priming make the task a top-down one even though there is no explicit "search" traditionally associated with top-down mechanisms ?
More generally, what is the relationship between top-down mechanisms and priming the visual system ?