Abstract: By adopting Combined Raven's Test(CRT)revised by the Psychology Department of East China Normal University, 87 subjects including young and old adult training groups were tested with “Method of Loci”, and control groups matching in age, sex, cultural background and I.Q. The purpose of this study was to explore age differences on the ability of[observation and reasoning from analogy, and the indirect transfer effects of]training to ability. The results showed that the young group performances on Raven Test were signifficantly higher than that of the older group. Age difference was enlarged when the difficulty of task incresed and the test time constrained. The performances of the young training group on Raven test were obviously higher than that of the young control group and the old training group,while no significant differences was observed between the old training group and the old control group.

Key words: Raven test, Memory training of “Method of Loci”, Indirect transfer, reasoning ability