Recognizing information that is relevant to ourselves is an important part of human information processing that allows us to quickly and accurately respond to potentially life-threatening situations. Many studies have shown that mere self-relevance can lead to behaviourally meaningful and robust processing benefits. However, the mechanisms via which this self-prioritization occurs remains unclear. While many processing stages are involved in its generation, some authors argue that self-relevance does not permeate to perceptual processing levels, but originates from higher-level, decisional processes. The present study used a TVA-informed temporal order judgement paradigm to assess the effects of self-association on early attentional selection for perception versus social discrimination. Across two experiments (each N = 70), we show that social association of arbitrary information leads to processing facilitation via increases in processing speed of self-associated perceptual objects. On the other hand, when participants have to discriminate the temporal order of information based on its social associations, this benefit is absent, suggesting the involvement of higher-level, compensatory mechanisms. Overall, these findings suggest that the relative social salience of self- over other-related information triggers a selective reallocation of attentional resources between the socially loaded perceptual objects. They further suggest that self-association leads to benefits of attentional selection at the level of the perceptual object and does not require the active decoding of social association for decisional processes.