The basic SOM is indi erent to the ordering of the input patterns. Real data, however, is often sequential in nature thus context of a pattern may signi cantly in uence its correct interpretation. One simple SOM model that takes the context of a pattern into account is the Temporal K ohonen Map (TKM),which was modi ed into the Recurrent Self Organizing Map (RSOM). We show analytically and with experiments that the RSOM is a signi cant improvement over the TKM because the RSOM model allows simple derivation of a consistent update rule.