Excitatory neurons have heterogeneous ILD tuning and inhibitory neurons have reliable and selective ILD tuning. a, The ILD tuning curves for significantly tuned (ANOVA, p < 0.05) excitatory (left) and inhibitory (right) neurons. Each row shows the ILD tuning curve for one neuron. All tuning curves were normalized to have the same maximum and minimum for plotting. Neurons were sorted by best ILD. b, Left panel, Peak normalized ILD tuning curve of example neuron (thin line, individual repetition; thick line, averaged cross 10 repetitions; gray patch, response area). The responses at seven ILDs are as follows: 0.0000, 0.0368, 0.2387, 0.5725, 0.8091, 1.0000, and 0.8716. The summed responses total 3.5287, which corresponds to a 30 dB tuning area. Right panel, Fitted ILD tuning curve of example neuron (dot, averaged response to each ILD; solid curve, fitted ILD curve; dashed line, half-peak threshold). The fitted curve has a peak response slightly <1 (0.88 in this example). We use the intersection of the half-peak threshold on the y-axis of the fitted curve to determine the ILD half-peak value, which corresponds to the x-axis value of the intersected curve. c, Top, Tuning reliability. The median is 0.21 for excitatory (orange line) and 0.26 for inhibitory neurons (green line). The effect size is −0.061, and the 95% confidence interval is −0.088 and −0.034. Middle, Response area. The median is 26.5 dB for excitatory neurons and 23.7 dB for inhibitory neurons. The effect size is 0.054, and the 95% confidence interval is 0.039 and 0.068. Bottom, ILD half-peak value. The median is 11.78 dB for excitatory and 15.51 dB for inhibitory neurons. The effect size is −4.133, and the 95% confidence interval is −6.169 and −2.097. Because we only included neurons that had a peak at 30 dB ILD in the bottom panel, the number of neurons is less than those of the top and middle panels.