Perceptual color spacing derived from Maximum Likelihood Multidimensional Scaling.

The canonical application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) methods has been to color dissimilarities, visualizing these as distances in a low-dimensional space. Some questions that remain are how well the locations of stimuli in color space can be recovered when data are sparse, and how well can systematic individual variations in perceptual scaling be distinguished from stochastic noise? We collected triadic comparisons for saturated and desaturated sets of Natural Colour System (NCS) samples, each set forming an approximate hue circle. Maximum-Likelihood MDS was used to reconstruct the configuration of stimuli more accurately than the standard ‘vote-count’ approach. Individual departures from the consensus response pattern were minor, but repeated across stimulus sets, and identifiable as variations in the salience of color-space axes. No gender differences could be discerned, contrary to earlier results. © 2015 Optical Society of America