MDS as a Psychological Model

Abstract

MDS has been used not only as a tool for data analysis but also as a framework for modeling psychological phenomena. This is made clear by equating an MDS space with the notion of psychological space. A metric geometry is interpreted as a model that explains perceptions of similarity. Most attention has been devoted to investigations where the distance function was taken as a composition rule for generating similarity judgments from dimensional differences. Minkowski distances are one family of such composition rules. Guided by such modeling hypotheses, psychophysical studies on well-designed simple stimuli such as rectangles uncovered interesting regularities of human similarity judgments. This model also allows one to study how responses conditioned to particular stimuli are generalized to other stimuli.