To survive in a rapidly dynamic world, the brain predicts the timing of upcoming events and proactively adjusts perception, attention and action. Temporal anticipation, referred to as implicit timing, has been claimed to be functionally and neurally dissociated from explicit temporal judgments. Furthermore, key roles have been proposed for entrainment of neural oscillations to dynamics sensory streams, as well as for cortical circuits. I will present studies that combined computational modelling, psychophysics and EEG recording in healthy and neurological populations to challenge these ideas. These will show that oscillatory entrainment fails to explain neural phase alignment to speech, and that subcortical circuits in the cerebellum and basal ganglia have a causal role in temporal anticipation. I will then show how this latter finding is leveraged to reveal unique entrainment mechanisms to isochronous streams, and overlap between implicit and explicit timing. Altogether, these findings expand and refine our understanding of implicit timing, pointing to functionally and neurally context-specificity and subcortical-cortical interactions.
