Lateral inhibitory effect is a well-known feature of information processing in neural systems.This paper presents a neural array model with simple lateral inhibitory connections.After detailed examining into the dynamics of this kind of neural array,the author gives the sufficient conditions under which the outputs of the network will tend to a special stable pattern called spatial sparse pattern in which if the output of a neuron is 1,then the outputs of the neurons in its neighborhood are 0.This ability called spatial sparse coding plays an important role in self-coding,self-organization and associative memory for patterns and pattern sequences.The main conclusions about the dynamics of this kind of neural array which is related to spatial sparse coding are introduced.