Food-predicting stimuli in our everyday environments play a powerful role in driving food seeking and consumption, often promoting eating even in the absence of physiological hunger. This phenomenon can be modelled in the laboratory using the general Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (gPIT) paradigm, which demonstrates how these stimuli can invigorate instrumental actions earning food reward. Recent evidence suggests that while gPIT is normally regulated by our internal motivational state (i.e., whether we are hungry or not), this modulation is disrupted in obesity, resulting in persistent cue-driven food seeking regardless of satiety. My PhD research aims to identify the neural circuits that encode and regulate the motivational influence of food-predicting stimuli, and how these processes may be altered following diet-induced obesity. By combining behavioural paradigms with targeted circuit manipulations (such as chemogenetics and optogenetics) in rodent models, my work seeks to characterise the neural substrates underlying how internal motivational state modulates cue-driven food seeking, and how this control breaks down in obesity. More broadly, this research aims to advance our understanding of the neural bases of maladaptive feeding behaviour, with potential implications for interventions targeting overeating and obesity.