Checklist when working with external data

When working with data acquired by other labs, you may need to pre-process it to make it suitable for your project. Tasks such as building stimulus-response arrays, re-sampling data, or adapting formats for your analyses are common. However, since you did not acquire or compile the data yourself, understanding meta-information (e.g., sampling rate, length of visual stimulation) can be challenging. To minimize the risk of incorrect preprocessing, it is crucial to perform the following sanity and validation checks:

• Cross-check the total length of the data with the duration of visual stimulation.
• Sanity checks if whitenoise data is part of the dataset ** Calculate the spatio-temporal receptive fields. ** Verify that the temporal receptive fields indicate response latency within the expected range for the light levels used during recordings. ** Verify that the spatial receptive field diameter is within the expected range for that cell type and light level.