Purpose: This paper aims to stimulate the discussion in the fields of hospitality, tourism and leisure on what exactly constitutes “an experience” and how to measure it; the authors unpack the experience construct into its core constituent elements, namely, emotions. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience that define experiences as a fine-grained temporal succession of emotions that occur during an experiential episode. Limitations of current methods for measuring experiences are discussed, after which biometric and neuroscientific methods are reviewed that are optimally geared toward measuring emotions, as they occur during an experience with fine temporal detail. Findings: An overview is presented of the available studies within the fields of hospitality, tourism and leisure that use these methodologies. These studies show that using these methodologies provides a fruitful methodological approach to measuring experiences in real time. Practical implications: Companies are constantly seeking to create memorable experiences for their customers. The proposed research methodologies allow companies to get a more fine-grained image of what impacts customers over the course of their experience and to actively integrate the use of emotions into creating experiences, as emotions are key to making them memorable. Originality/value: The paper sketches the contours of a rapidly emerging framework that unpacks memorable experiences into their constituent element – emotions. It is proposed that this will contribute to a deeper understanding of how consumers experience offerings in the hospitality, tourism and leisure industry.
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There is an emerging interest in understanding the cognitive, emotional and motivational processes that drive tourists’ behaviour using neuroscientific research methods. This chapter briefly reviews the main methods of interest to tourism researchers, to then focuses on electroencephalography, which reflects electrical activity from the brain. Event-related potentials or electroencephalography oscillations reflect cognitive and affective processes. Components of the former can index emotional brain responses, and alpha oscillations are related to attention and approach/withdrawal. Existing tourism literature/using electroencephalography are reviewed. This is a promising tool for studying a range of phenomena that are of interest to tourism scholars, but require careful use of methods and interpretation.
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From the article: Abstract Over the last decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the brain constitutes only one of several contributing factors to cognition, the other factors being the body and the world. This position we refer to as Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The main purpose of this paper is to consider what EEC implies for the task interpretation of the control system. We argue that the traditional view of the control system as involved in planning and decision making based on beliefs about the world runs into the problem of computational intractability. EEC views the control system as relying heavily on the naturally evolved fit between organism and environment. A ‘lazy’ control structure could be ‘ignorantly successful’ in a ‘user friendly’ world, by facilitating the transitory creation of a flexible and integrated set of behavioral layers that are constitutive of ongoing behavior. We close by discussing the types of questions this could imply for empirical research in cognitive neuroscience and robotics.
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