We describe and discuss in detail some recent results by Sinha and Ditto [Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2156 (1998)] demonstrating the capacity of a lattice of threshold coupled chaotic maps to perform computations. Such systems are shown to emulate logic gates, encode numbers, and perform specific arithmetic operations, such as addition and multiplication, as well as yield more specialized operations such as the calculation of the least common multiplier of a sequence of numbers. Furthermore, we extend the scheme to multidimensional continuous time dynamics, in particular to a system relevant to chaotic lasers.