Deciding what is the right thing to do is one of the most fundamental brain functions. Adaptive decision-making integrates past experiences, the behavioral options as well as the present environment and one’s own internal state. Choosing the right action at the right time is essential for survival, and a universal problem of behavioral control that all animals are confronted with. Still, the neuronal circuit principles by which appropriate behaviors are selected while others are suppressed remain enigmatic.
Critically, investigating this question requires comparison in order to be able to discern the mechanistic detail from the general principle. Furthermore, comparisons across species allow exploiting the unique experimental approaches in the respective model systems, and their particular behavioral and cognitive faculties. Therefore, in this symposium we want to elucidate recent progress in neuronal mechanisms of decision-making in different model organisms from flies and zebrafish to rodents and monkeys. The topics covered by the speakers include the neuronal circuitry of sensorimotor decisions in fly larvae, the mechanisms for feeding decisions and goal-directed navigation in flies, circuit analyses of decisions in response to visual stimuli in zebrafish, pro-social choices and the impact of the social context on decision-making in rats, and neural correlates of decisions in probabilistic tasks in monkeys.

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