Transit offers stop-to-stop services rather than door-to-door services. The trip from a transit hub to the final destination is often entitled as the “last-mile” trip. This study innovatively proposes a hybrid approach by combining the data mining technique and multiple attribute decision making to identify the optimal travel mode for last-mile, in which the data mining technique is applied in order to objectively determine the weights. Four last-mile travel modes, including walking, bike-sharing, community bus, and on-demand ride-sharing service, are ranked based upon three evaluation criteria: travel time, monetary cost, and environmental performance. The selection of last-mile trip modes in Chengdu, China, is taken as a typical case example, to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach. Results show that the optimal travel mode highly varies by the distance of the “last-mile” and that bike-sharing serves as the optimal travel mode if the last-mile distance is no more than 3 km, whilst the community bus becomes the optimal mode if the distance equals 4 and 5 km. It is expected that this study offers an evidence-based approach to help select the reasonable last-mile travel mode and provides insights into developing a sustainable urban transport system.

Carbon labeling describes carbon dioxide emissions across food lifecycles, contributing to enhancing consumers’ low-carbon awareness and promoting low-carbon consumption behaviors. In a departure from the existing literature on carbon labeling that heavily relies on interviews or questionnaire surveys, this study forms a hybrid of an auction experiment and a consumption experiment to observe university students’ purchase intention and willingness to pay for a carbon-labeled food product. In this study, students from a university in a city (Chengdu) of China, the largest carbon emitter, are taken as the experimental group, and cow’s milk is selected as the experimental food product. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: (1) the purchase of carbon-labeled milk products is primarily influenced by price; (2) the willingness to pay for carbon-labeled milk products primarily depends on the premium; and (3) the students are willing to accept a maximum price premium of 3.2%. This study further offers suggestions to promote the formation of China’s carbon product-labeling system and the marketization of carbon-labeled products and consequently facilitate low-carbon consumption in China.

Consumer neuroscience is a new paradigm for studying consumer behavior, focusing on neuroscientific tools to explore the underlying neural processes and behavioral implications of consumption. Based on the bibliometric analysis tools, this paper provides a review of progress in research on consumer neuroscience during 2000–2021. In this paper, we identify research hotspots and frontiers in the field through a statistical analysis of bibliometric indicators, including the number of publications, countries, institutions, and keywords. Aiming at facilitating carbon neutrality via sustainable consumption, this paper discusses the prospects of applying neuroscience to sustainable consumption. The results show 364 publications in the field during 2000–2021, showing a rapid upward trend, indicating that consumer neuroscience research is gaining ground. The majority of these consumer neuroscience studies chose to use electroencephalogram tools, accounting for 63.8% of the total publications; the cutting-edge research mainly involved event-related potential (ERP) studies of various marketing stimuli interventions, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based studies of consumer decision-making and emotion-specific brain regions, and machine-learning-based studies of consumer decision-making optimization models.

Improvement in an individuals’ cognition is the key to promote garbage classification. This study takes university students as the research subjects, through three educational interventions, including the self-learning, heuristic learning, and interactive learning ways, to seek the most effective intervention based upon event-related potentials (ERPs) that is beneficial to enhance cognition of garbage classification. The results show that the experimental subjects induced P300 and LPP components, representing attentional changes and cognitive conflicts in classification judgments. There are differences in the amplitudes and peak latency of the two components corresponding to different interventions, indicating that the three educational interventions are able to improve the individual’s cognition level of garbage classification within a certain period of time. The interactive-learning intervention triggers the largest amplitudes of P300 and LPP, as well as the smallest peak latency, indicating its effect is the best. Such results provide insight into the design for an appropriate strategy in garbage classification education. The study also shows that an EEG signal can be used as the endogenous neural indicator to measure the performance of garbage classification under different educational interventions.

Waste sorting, as an embodiment of behavioral cognition, is regulated by two cognitive processes, namely, Categorization (C) and Category-Based Induction (CBI). This study employed the event-related potential (ERP) technique to assess whether there is a transformation between C and CBI in waste sorting cognition, in order to help individuals establish a correct waste sorting behavior. We reported a case of intervention in waste sorting education with a 58-year-old Chinese woman to discriminate whether such intervention facilitates the transition between C and CBI. The results showed that the waste sorting cognition follows a developmental model as C-CBI-C, where education may help the subject build a cognitive framework for waste sorting by altering inherent misperceptions and filling gaps in classification knowledge. The results also noticed that FN400 is identified as a characteristic waveform in the CBI process, by which it is indicated that the first 4 to 7 days of education is a critical period for establishing the cognitive framework. Through a comparison of the ERP waveforms at different stages of intervention, the results are insightful to help individuals improve their cognition of waste sorting.