Checklist when working with external data

When working with data acquired by other labs, you may have to pre-process it to get it into the right format. For example build stimulus-response arrays, re-sample stimulus-response for your project, etc. Because the data was not acquired or compiled by you, it is not always easy to figure out meta info such as sampling rate, length of visual stimulation, etc. So it is important to run some of the following sanity and validation checks to ensure that can minimize the chances of incorrect preprocessing.

• If the data contains whitenoise, calculate the spatio-temporal receptive fields (RFs). The temporal RFs should show resposne latency within an expected range for the light level at which the recordings were performed.