This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: If you've ever felt overwhelmed by menu options at a restaurant, cereal varieties at the grocery store or potential partners while scrolling through dating apps, you've experienced choice overload. People aren't the only ones to have trouble making decisions when confronted with many options simultaneously.
In our new study published in the journal iScience, my colleagues and I found similar effects of choice overload in female gray tree frogs when faced with too many calls from males looking for love. Scientists have observed many species having similar decision-making problems when experiencing choice overload. But we know little about how these kinds of cognitive constraints affect animals in natural settings.
The gray tree frogs we focused on live in wooded areas near sources of water in North America. During the mating season, males gather in choruses and call to attract mates. Females pick mates based on several call attributes, including call length.
Longer calls are more attractive. For our experiment, we captured 60 female tree frogs from breeding choruses in East Tennessee and brought them into our lab. Then we played recorded mating calls for each female, giving her a choice between one long, attractive "target" call and one, three or seven shorter, less attractive "distractor" calls.
In the wild, a tree frog breeding chorus can include dozens or even hundreds of calling males. In our lab setup, the calls played sequentially, so they never overlapped. Each female would hop toward the speaker broadcasting the call she preferred.
As the number of distractor calls increased, females got worse at picking the attractive call, took longer to decide and were more likely to defer choosing within the 10-minute window altogether. Because we eliminated call overlap entirely, we know this decline wasn't due to what researchers call energetic masking. That's the well-documented problem of overlapping signals impairing an individual's ability to detect and discriminate a signal from noise.
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