AUTHOR=Rosenbaum Robert, Trousdale James, Josic Kresimir TITLE=The Effects of Pooling on Spike Train Correlations JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=5 YEAR=2011 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2011.00058 DOI=10.3389/fnins.2011.00058 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=Neurons integrate inputs from thousands of afferents. Similarly, some experimental techniques record the pooled activity of large populations of cells. When cells in these populations are correlated, the correlation coefficient between the collective activity of two subpopulations is typically much larger than the correlation coefficient between individual cells: The act of pooling individual cell signals amplifies correlations. We give an overview of this phenomenon and present several implications. In particular, we show that pooling leads to synchronization in feedforward networks and that it can amplify and otherwise distort correlations between recorded signals.