Experimental design. (A) Behavioral testing. Animals were trained on a Go/No-go operant conditioning task to detect broadband (1–42 kHz) noise bursts presented in pseudorandom order from 30 to 90 dB SPL. Reaction time (RT) was quantified as the latency between sound onset and removal of the rat’s nose from the nose-poke hole on Go trials. (B) Electrophysiological recordings. Behaviorally trained rats were bilaterally implanted with chronic tungsten microelectrodes in the AC and IC. Recordings were made from awake, head-fixed rats while passively listening to the same range of broadband noise bursts used for behavioral testing. (C) Behavioral-electrophysiological paradigm. Animals were tested daily to collect RT-I functions (see Methods and panel A.). Immediately following behavioral testing, auditory-evoked local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded from RT-I-trained rats (see Methods and panel B). Following 3 baseline LFP testing sessions (every other day over 5 days), rats were treated with sodium salicylate (SS; 200 mg/kg, i.p.) and then RT-I functions, followed by LFP input/output (I/O) functions, were collected beginning 2 h and 24 h post-SS. (D) Representative LFP tuning curves from the left (L) and right (R) AC/IC of an awake animal. Tone-evoked LFP responses were well-tuned for frequency and matched for characteristic frequency within but not between hemispheres. Scale for each division is 400 μV by 30 ms. (E) Mean (n = 8) of three baseline RT-I functions; note close overlap of three measurements. (F) Mean AC and (G) IC I/O functions (n = 8) collected concurrently from the same animals over the same 3 baseline days of testing as RT-I functions in (E). Note overlap and stable measures over all three AC and IC baseline test sessions. One-way repeated measures ANOVA found no significant effect of testing session for RT-I (F(2,18) = 0.037, p = 0.98, ƞ2 = 0.004), AC LFP I/O (F(2,18) = 0.053, p = 0.98, ƞ2 = 0.006), or IC LFP I/O (F(2,18) = 0.019, p = 0.99, ƞ2 = 0.002) functions. Data points represent mean ± SEM.