Abstract: Animals must carry out a variety of goal-directed behaviors on a continuous basis in order to meet multiple needs that are time-varying, time-sensitive, and survival-essential. These needs include for example obtaining food and water, finding shelter, defending territory, positive social interactions, and sleeping. The actions required to pursue these goals are often mutually exclusive. Regulating behavior therefore requires assessing the urgency and importance of various needs as well as weighing evidence about the likely outcomes of possible behaviors. Often animals must commit to discrete actions in the face of unresolved or unresolvable uncertainty or ambivalence. In this talk I will define "decision" as the goal-directed selection among alternative potential actions, without necessarily implying deliberation or even conscious awareness.  I will describe three different kinds of decisions rats make in the context of one artificial operant task: interpreting internal state and experienced reward rates to decide whether it is worth performing an effortful activity to gain water; interpreting ambiguous sensory stimuli to decide which among alternative behavioral targets is most likely to yield water; and (I will suggest) determining the extent to which sensory decisions are ruled by bottom-up or top-down processing of information.

The Reinagel Lab at UCSD