Mammalian visual cortices contain multiple superimposed maps for different stimulus attributes, such as receptive field position, edge orientation, spatial frequency, direction of motion and eye preference. I will review some of the experimental evidence for the existence of these maps as well as the evidence for gradient relationships and other types of structural link between them. I will compare these data with modelling results obtained using Kohonen's Self-Organising Feature Map algorithm which implements a competitive learning rule. I will discuss the extent to which the maps produced by this model, and a variant of it, are able to reproduce the experimentally observed properties of individual maps, as well as the gradient relationships between different maps.

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