RCDTT Associate Director Prof. Mimi Li Delivers Keynote at the 20th Anniversary High-End Forum on Neuro-Management

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of neuro-management, Professor Mimi Li, Associate Director of the Research Centre for Digital Transformation of Tourism (RCDTT) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, delivered a keynote presentation titled “New Frontiers in Neuro-Management: From Organizational Decision-Making to Experience Management.” The presentation marked an important step in extending neuro-management research into broader disciplinary contexts and advancing its academic significance.

From Method Novelty to Problem-Driven Research

Over the past two decades, neuro-management and neuromarketing have developed from an early focus on whether neuroscience tools could be applied to management and marketing research into a more mature interdisciplinary field. Current research increasingly emphasizes problem-driven inquiry, methodological integration, interpretability, reproducibility, and ethical governance. Tools such as EEG, eye-tracking, GSR/EDA, facial recognition, fMRI, BCI, and AI-assisted analytics have enabled researchers to examine attention, emotion, memory, value evaluation, and behavioral prediction with greater precision.

However, existing studies remain heavily concentrated in pre-consumption contexts, particularly advertising exposure, attention capture, evaluation formation, brand perception, product preference, and purchase intention. By contrast, relatively limited attention has been paid to what happens during consumption and after consumption, including experience dynamics, emotional fluctuation, memory formation, satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and meaning construction.

Tourism and Hospitality as an Ideal Context for Experience Management

Tourism and hospitality offer a distinctive and highly valuable context for advancing neuro-management from “decision-making research” to “experience management research.” Unlike tangible products, tourism experiences are intangible, heterogeneous, inseparable, perishable, and strongly embedded in non-local contexts. Their value is not merely determined at the point of choice; rather, it emerges throughout the experience itself.

In tourism, experience is not a static outcome but a dynamic process shaped by spatial environments, temporal progression, bodily engagement, service encounters, social interaction, sensory stimuli, and memory. This makes tourism an ideal field for studying how experiences are perceived, evaluated, remembered, and managed.

Emerging Research in Neuro-Tourism

Drawing on recent tourism and hospitality studies that employ cognitive neuroscience methods, the presentation reviewed emerging research on tourism experience design, experience memory, negative experiences, virtual tourism, service interaction, behavioral intervention, and immersive experiences. These studies show that tourism experiences are shaped not only by information and choice architecture, but also by familiarity and novelty, emotion, touch, soundscape, visual attention, risk perception, embodiment, narrative engagement, and social interaction.

This emerging body of work suggests that neuro-tourism research is beginning to move beyond the question of “how consumers choose” toward a deeper understanding of “how experiences are formed, amplified, regulated, and remembered.”

Research Gaps and Future Directions

Despite these advances, tourism-related neuroscience research remains strongly influenced by the marketing paradigm. Many studies continue to focus on marketing effectiveness, brand perception, and purchase tendency, while research on tourism-specific behavioral and experiential mechanisms remains insufficient. The presentation therefore called for greater attention to real-world, mobile, field-based, and naturalistic research designs, as well as stronger integration of EEG, eye-tracking, GSR, behavioral data, AI, and machine learning.

Professor Li further emphasized that cognitive neuroscience should not merely serve as a more sophisticated substitute for traditional methods. Its value lies in revealing dimensions of perception, attention, emotion, memory, and interaction that are unable to capture through self-reported methods alone.

Toward a New Stage of Neuro-Management

The shift from decision-making to experience management represents an important expansion of the neuro-management research paradigm. It responds to the complexity of real consumption contexts and highlights the need to study experiences as dynamic, embodied, social, and memorable processes. For tourism and hospitality research, this shift opens new possibilities for experience design, service optimization, inclusive design, destination management, digital transformation, and responsible innovation.