[Purpose/significance] Health information substituting search involves not only the searcher's psychologi?
cal motivation represented by empathy, but also the searcher's cognitive internalization of the contents. This study at?
tempted to investigate the effects of users’empathic nature and empathic ability on memory levels in health informa?
tion substituting search, and to elucidate the relationship among empathy, search and memory. The examination of
searchers' empathy and cognition in health information substituting search is conducive to optimizing the search pro?
cess, improving search effectiveness, and enhancing the information service capability of health information substitut?
ing search. [Method/process] This study used a user experiment to control for subjects′empathy nature and measure
search behaviour and performance. Before the experiment, empathic ability was measured through a scale, and the ac?
curacy of memory and meta-memory were calculated through the signal detection theory and probabilistic judgment
paradigm of cognitive psychology after finishing the experiment. [Result/conclusion] The results showed that there
was no significant effect of empathic nature on searchers′memory levels, searching behaviors and performance. The ef?
fect of empathic ability was significant: the stronger the empathic ability, the shorter the searchers′searching time and
the lower the memory accuracy and metamemory accuracy. Further tests showed that the effects of empathic ability on
searching behaviors and memory levels were independent of each other.
