In order to study the effect of polymer retention on conformance control and production performance in an ultralow permeability heterogeneous reservoir，the artificial heterogeneous core models are used to perform a series of polymer conformance control experiments followed by production under the natural energy. Based on the novel designed experimental apparatus for reservoirs with an edge and bottom water and produced by the natural energy，the similarity simulation for the production characteristics of a practical oilfield is achieved in laboratory. The effect of polymer retention rate on water channeling control，reservoir pressure maintaining，oil production stabilization and enhanced oil recovery were analyzed.The results show that the increase of the polymer retention in the high-permeability layer is helpful to control water channeling，inhibit the decline rate of reservoir pressure，and extend the relatively high production period of production wells.Additionally，the oil recovery and the rate of polymer retention are non-monotonic，namely，there is an optimal retention rate（RC）to reach the highest oil recovery. Taking the optimal retention rate of polymer as the benchmark，higher or lower polymer retention rate leads to an obvious decline in oil recovery. For the target reservoir，the laboratory results show that the optimal polymer retention rate are 70% to 82%，and the optimal polymer injection volume are 0.3 PV to 0.6 PV（PV represents the pore volume of the high-permeability layer）. An effective conformance control technology for an ultra-low permeability heterogeneous reservoir needs to provide both optimal polymer injection volume and polymer retention rate.