It has been shown that great majority of auditory fibers ascending in the lateral lemniscus terminate in the CNIC.

In addition, the IC receives inputs from the auditory cortex, the medial division of the medial geniculate body, the posterior limitans, suprapeduncular nucleus and subparafascicular intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, the substantia nigra pars compacta lateralis, the dorsolateral periaqueductal gray, the nucleus of the brachium of the inferior colliculus (or inferior brachium) and deep layers of the superior colliculus.

This inferior colliculus contralateral to the ear it is receiving the most information from, then projects to its ipsilateral medial geniculate nucleus.

The Conrad Simon Memorial Research Initiative measured the blood flow of the IC and put a number at 1.80 cc/g/min in the cat brain.

[5] Skottun et al. measured the interaural time difference sensitivity of single neurons in the inferior colliculus, and used these to predict behavioural performance.

[6] This suggested that by the level of the inferior colliculus, integration of information over multiple neurons is unnecessary (see population code).

Axiomatically determined functional models of spectro-temporal receptive fields in inferior colliculus have been determined by Lindeberg and Friberg [7] in terms of derivatives of Gaussian functions over the log-spectral domain and either Gaussian kernels over time in the case of non-causal time or first-order integrators (truncated exponential kernels) coupled in cascade in the case of truly time-causal operations, optionally in combination with local glissando transformations to account for variations in frequencies over time.

The shapes of the receptive field functions in these models can be determined by necessity from structural properties of the environment combined with requirements about the internal structure of the auditory system to enable theoretically well-founded processing of sound signals at different temporal and log-spectral scales.