Effective decision-making involves the ability to learn relationships between actions and their consequences to form expectations about future outcomes. These expectations must be encoded properly if they are to be retrieved to perform behaviours that are efficient and purposeful. My PhD research focuses on the acquisition and consolidation of associative learning from initial training and how this drives the performance of goal-directed behaviour. Using different viral techniques to target specific brain structures, my research aims to map out the role of prefrontal-striatal-hippocampal circuitry in learning new associations and the subsequent consolidation of these associations from short- to long-term memory.