While religious beliefs are typically studied using paper-based or online questionnaires and surveys, there are no standardized tools available for experimental studies of religious cognition. Here we present the first such tool - the Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs (CPICB) - which consists of audio-recorded items of religious beliefs as well as items of three control conditions: moral beliefs, abstract scientific knowledge, and empirical everyday life knowledge. The CPICB is designed in such a way that the ultimate meaning of each sentence is revealed only by its final critical word, which enables precise measurement of reaction times and/or latencies of neurophysiological responses. Each statement comes in a pair of Agree/Disagree versions of critical words, which allows experimental contrasting between belief and disbelief conditions. Psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic matching between Agree/Disagree versions of sentences as well as across different categories of the CPICB items (Religious, Moral, Scientific, Everyday) enables a rigorous control of low-level psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic features while testing higher-level (dis)beliefs. In the exploratory Study 1 (N=20), we developed and tested a preliminary version of the CPICB that had 480 items. After selecting 400 items that yielded the most consistent responses, we carried out a confirmatory test-retest Study 2 (N=40). Pre-registered data analyses confirmed excellent construct validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the CPICB religious (dis)belief statements. We conclude that the CPICB is suitable for studying Christian beliefs in an experimental setting involving behavioural and neuroimaging paradigms, and provide Open Access to the inventory items, fostering further development of the experimental research of religious cognition.

[Manuscript submitted for review]There is growing appreciation for the role of long-term memory in guiding temporal preparation. In experiments with variable foreperiods between a warning stimulus (S1) and a target stimulus (S2), preparation is affected by foreperiod distributions experienced in the past, long after the distribution has changed. Such memory-guided preparation shapes preparation largely implicitly and outside of a participants’ control. Recent studies have demonstrated the associative nature of such memory-guided preparation. When distinct S1s predict different foreperiods, they can trigger dissociative preparation accordingly. Here, we demonstrate that memory-guided preparation allows for another key feature of learning: the ability to generalize across acquired associations and apply them to novel situations. Participants completed a foreperiod task where S1 was a unique image of either a face or a scene on each trial. Images of either category were paired with different distributions with predominantly shorter versus predominantly longer foreperiods. Participants displayed dissociative preparation to never-before seen images of either category, without being aware of the predictive nature of these categories. They continued doing so in a subsequent transfer phase, after they had been informed that these contingencies no longer held. A novel rolling regression analysis revealed at a fine timescale how category-guided preparation gradually developed throughout the task, and illustrated how instructions at the start of the transfer phase interacted with these influences from long-term memory. These results offer new insights into temporal preparation as the product of a largely implicit process governed by associative learning from past experiences.