AUTOMATIC CHANGE DETECTION - DOES THE AUDITORY-SYSTEM USE REPRESENTATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL STIMULUS FEATURES OR GESTALTS

The effects of global and feature-specific probabilities of auditory s timuli were manipulated to determine their effects on the mismatch neg ativity (MMN) of the human event-related potential. The question of in terest was whether the automatic comparison of stimuli indexed by the MMN was performed on representations of individual stimulus features o r on gestalt representations of their combined attributes. The design of the study was such that both feature and gestalt representations co uld have been available to the comparator mechanism generating the MMN . The data were consistent with the interpretation that the MMN was ge nerated following an analysis of stimulus features.