How does the brain make decisions when faced with conflicting options?

Animals face conflicting situations every day where they must decide between essential needs, for instance, feeding or escaping a predator. Prioritising the correct behaviour is crucial for an animal's survival, as well as to ensure it is making the most of available resources. The brain must evaluate the available options, integrating both internal physiological drives and environmental cues, to produce the optimal behavioural response. However, how external cues such as an animal's social context modulates action-selection is not fully understood. The decision between reproduction and survival is evidently an essential one. Hence, by using a newly developed behavioural paradigm in which male Drosophila are given the option to mate or escape a threat, this project aims to investigate how social context impacts action-selection. Using a highly tractable experimental system, we aim to advance the field by providing a mechanistic account of how behaviours are prioritised in a context-dependent manner at a cellular and neural circuit level.