The charcterization of functional properties of visual neurons has formed the foundation of our current knowledge of processing in the early visual pathway. Classical techniques in mapping the spatiotemporal receptive field (RF) assume stationary behavior of the underlying encoding process. It is obvious, however, that the fundamental functinal relationship between stimulus and response is an elusive measure that varies continuously over time as a function of stimulus properties and/or neural state. For example, it has been recently shown that the cortical RF extent can change dramatically on the time-scale of seconds to minutes. This implies that these temporal dynamics could often be masked, given that RF estimates are often computed from data sets spanning that time frame. We have developed adaptive frequency-domain based reverse correlation techinques for charcterizing the dynamic nature of such phenomena, and have obtained preliminary results in cat visual cortex suggesting that some simple cells modulate RF properties on the time scale of seconds to minutes. This approach also extends to the temporal response characteristics, where the temporal component of spatiotemporal RF reveals the relative latency, as well as the biphasic nature, of the neuronal response. Preliminary results in X cells in cat LGN suggest that the response latency decreases in a continuous manner over the course of seconds, while the excitatory peak increases. Furthermore, LGN response to natural scenes suggests that local contrast levels continuously modulate the underlying dynamics.