Auditory elicitation of the P300 event-related evoked potential in the rat

Auditory stimuli were used to elicit a P300 event-related evoked potential (ERP) in rat. Test conditions were comparable to those for eliciting ERP's in humans. A train of background tones with a randomly inserted target tone at a ten to one ratio were presented individually to ten unrestrained subjects in a baseline, a novel, and a trained condition. In the novel condition EEG's were averaged from subjects hearing both background and target stimuli for the first time. In the trained condition, subjects were previously trained using footshock in a shuttle box to discriminate the target tone. A statistical comparison of an ERP peak elicited at approximately 300 msec in both the novel and target condition compared with the baseline demonstrated the presence of the P300 in the rat.