The effects of global and feature-specific probabilities
of auditory stimuli were manipulated to determine their
effects on the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the human event-related
potential. The question of interest was whether the automatic
comparison of stimuli indexed by the MMN was performed
on representations of individual stimulus features or on
gestalt representations of their combined attributes. The
design of the study was such that both feature and gestalt
representations could have been available to the comparator
mechanism generating the MMN. The data were consistent
with the interpretation that the MMN was generated following
an analysis of stimulus features.