The perceptual Self-Prioritization effect (SPE) refers to an advantage in attending to stimuli associated with the self relative to those associated with another individual. In the perceptual matching task, arbitrary pairings between oneself and other persons, and a geometric shape need to be learned. Apart from the SPE, this task also produces high matching performance for a close other. While cognitive representations of past selves are sometimes viewed as resembling that of an intimate other, and while there is some evidence that other types of psychological closeness modulate the SPE, it remains unclear whether such prioritization effects extend to past selves. Previous experiments on this topic required participants to distinguish between different points in time within the same task, raising the possibility that potential past self-prioritization was masked by task difficulty. In our experiment, we addressed this potential confound by presenting N = 118 participants with a simpler version of the matching task. We re-investigated self-prioritization in perceptual matching under conditions of mental time travel to the past. In line with previous evidence, we found clear prioritization of present selves, which was evident in response times, accuracies and the efficiency of practice. Performance was consistently poorest for the past self, indicating not only a lack of privileged processing, but rather a relative de-prioritization. Performance was not improved by either increased proximity of the time period in question, nor by experimenter-induced re-imagining of the self. Our results do not support a perceptual prioritization of past selves.

知觉自我优先效应 (SPE) 是指在关注与自我相关的刺激方面相对于与其他个体相关的刺激方面的优势。在感知匹配任务中，需要学习自己和他人之间的任意配对，以及几何形状。除了 SPE 之外，此任务还可以为紧密的其他任务产生高匹配性能。虽然对过去自我的认知表征有时被视为类似于亲密他人的认知表征，并且虽然有一些证据表明其他类型的心理亲密感会调节 SPE，但尚不清楚这种优先化效应是否会延伸到过去的自我。以前关于这个主题的实验要求参与者在同一任务中区分不同的时间点，提高了过去潜在的自我优先次序被任务难度掩盖的可能性。在我们的实验中，我们通过呈现来解决这种潜在的混淆N  = 118 名参与者使用更简单的匹配任务。我们重新研究了在心理时间旅行到过去的情况下感知匹配中的自我优先化。与之前的证据一致，我们发现现在的自己有明确的优先次序，这在响应时间、准确性和实践效率方面很明显。过去的自己的表现一直是最差的，这表明不仅缺乏特权处理，而且相对降低了优先级。性能并没有因为所讨论的时间段的接近程度增加，也没有因为实验者引起的自我重新想象而得到改善。我们的结果不支持对过去自我的感知优先排序。