Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to study the age differences on divergent thinking and the transfer effect of memory training. The experimental subjects were 24 young and 20 old adults after memory training, and the control Ss were 24 young and 19 old adults who matched with the experimental groups. The results indicated: (1) There were marked age differences between the young and the old adults on fluency, flexibility and originality of figural, symbolic and semantic test items, and the individual differences of divergent thinking performances was rather large among young adults, but still less than that of the elderly, (2) Compared with the control groups, the performances of the young experimental group were significantly better on figural fluency and originality, and semantic originality, while the performances 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 a certain indirect transfer effect on divergent thinking, especially to young adults. (3)There were obvious and positive correlations between divergent thinking and imagination ability, the performances of "Digit-symbol" test, memory of words of pre-and post-training, and the memory performances of pictures as well but the "Vocabulary" test was only correlated with two forms of divergent thinking in the training group.

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