Abstract: The purpose of this work was to study the age differences on divergentthinking and the transfer effect of memory training. The experimental sub-jects were 24 young and 20 old adults after memory training, and the controlSs were 24 young and 19 old adults who matched with the experimentalgroups. The results indicated: (1) There were marked age differences betweenthe young and the old adults on fluency, flexibility and originality of figu-ral, symbolic and semantic test items; and the individual differences ofdivergent thinking performances was rather large among young adults, butstill less than that of the elderly, (2) Compared with the control groups, theperformances of the young experimental group were significantly better onfigural fluency and originality,and semantic originality,while the performan-ces of the old experimental group were better only on the figural flexibility(P=.052). It showed that memory training with the "Method of Loci" had acertain indirect transfer effect on divergent thinking, especially to young adu-lts. (3) There were obvious and positive correlations between divergent thinkingand imagination ability, the performances of "Digit-symbol" test, memory ofwords of pre-and post-training, and the memory performances of pictures aswell, but the"Vocabulary"test was only correlated with two forms of divergentthinking in the training group.

Key words: divergent thinking, age difference, memory training by "the method of loci", fluency, flexibility, originality