Examining tourist mindfulness in museums: the roles of familiarity and motivation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourists’ experiences in touristic learning settings are largely informed by their cognitive participation, where mindfulness plays a critical role. The tourism literature has rarely examined how such mindfulness is constructed. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of familiarity and motivation on mindfulness. Motivation is incorporated as a moderator into the proposed model based on self-determination theory. The model is tested using survey data collected at Zhejiang Provincial Museum (N = 363). Empirical results reveal that (1) cognitive familiarity, psychological familiarity, intrinsic motivation each positively influence mindfulness; (2) the effect of familiarity can be moderated by motivation.