Summary: We study the dynamical behavior of the collective field of chaotic systems on small world lattices. Coupled neuronal systems as well as coupled logistic maps are investigated. We observe that significant changes in dynamical properties occur only at a reasonably high strength of nonlocal coupling. Further, spectral features, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), change monotonically with respect to the fraction of random rewiring, i.e. there is no optimal value of the rewiring fraction for which spectral properties are most pronounced. We also observe that for small rewiring, results are similar to those obtained by adding small noise.