What is it like to perceive a feared object? According to a popular neo-Gibsonian theory in psychology, fear biases our perceptions of objects so as to encourage particular kinds of actions: when we are afraid, spiders may be perceived as physically closer than they are in order to promote fleeing. Firestone mounted severe criticisms against this view, arguing that these cases are better explained by non-perceptual biases that operate on accurate perceptions of the external environment. In this paper I will argue that fear might indeed distort our perceptions of the world, but not in the way neo-Gibsonians suppose. In the view I favor, perceptual distortions occur as by-products of fearful attention, a special mode of attention that is part of an orchestrated defensive response that prepares the organism to deal effectively with a threat. To argue for this view I will rely on empirical evidence that fearful attention narrows down the focus of attention and favors processing of local rather than global features of stimuli, which may jointly explain why perceptual distortions might occur in fearful object seeing. This view has consequences not only for empirical investigations in fearful perceptual distortions, but also for an explanation of the intentionality of fear and the phenomenal integration of bodily and intentional elements in fear episodes.

感知到恐惧的物体是什么感觉？根据流行的新吉布森主义心理学理论，恐惧使我们对物体的看法产生偏见，从而鼓励采取某些特定的行动：当我们感到恐惧时，蜘蛛在身体上可能会被感知为比他们离得更近，从而促进了逃逸。凡世通对这种观点提出了严厉的批评，认为这些情况可以通过对外部环境的准确理解而发挥作用的非感性偏见来更好地解释。在本文中，我将辩称，恐惧确实会扭曲我们对世界的看法，但不会像新吉布森主义者所设想的那样。我认为，感知扭曲是恐惧关注的副产品，这是一种特殊的关注模式，是精心安排的防御反应的一部分，可以使有机体有效应对威胁。为了对此观点辩护，我将依靠经验证据表明，恐惧的注意力会缩小注意力的范围，并倾向于处理刺激的局部特征而不是全局特征，这可以共同解释为什么在恐惧物体观察中会发生感知扭曲。这种观点不仅对可怕的知觉扭曲的实证研究产生影响，而且对解释恐惧的故意性以及恐惧事件中身体和故意因素的显着整合也有解释意义。