Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a generic term for a class of techniques or methods which attempt to construct a low-dimensional geometrical representation of the proximity matrix for a set of stimuli, with the goal of making any structure in the data as transparent as possible. The goal of all such techniques or method is to find a low-dimensional space in which points in the space represent stimuli, one point representing one stimulus, such that the distances between points in the space match as well as possible in some sense the original dissimilarities or the similarities. In a very common sense this simply means that the larger the observed dissimilarity value (or smaller the similarity value) amongs two stimuli, the further apart should be the points representing them in derived spatial solution. A common approach to finding the required coordinate values is to select them so as to minimize some least squares type fit criterion such as follows