Multidimensional Scaling Of The Molar Physical Environment

Two experiments were carried out in order to make tests of several hypotheses concerning perceptions of the molar physical environment. In the first, subjects did multiple category sorts of pictures of environments from three different functional orientations (what is done in or to the environment). In the second, subjects made similarity judgments of all pairs of the same pictures. Data from both experiments were analyzed by INDSCAL and MDSCAL and the resulting multidimensional stimulus spaces compared across conditions, experiments, and analysis methods. It was found that as functional orientations change (Expt. I), stimulus structures and dimensional interpretations of those structures remain invariant, while individual saliences of those dimensions change. Dimensions of naturalness and scale predominated in both experiments, and dimensional and stimulus structures were highly similar across judgment methods. INDSCAL and MDSCAL solutions were highly similar, but INDSCAL solutions were easier to interpret without rotation, while MDSCAL tended to extract fewer dimensions and to fit better with the original data. In the second experiment dimensional saliences were related to subjects' background characteristics and clusters of subjects were characterized according to differences in dimensional saliences.