During hunger onset, animals need to reprioritize the behaviours they express to maximize the chance of finding food. Selecting the appropriate actions requires them to gauge their internal hunger-state but also to weigh up the value of inputs coming from their external environment. The neural mechanisms that underlie this survival-linked perceptual decision-making are of significant interest, but poorly understood.To identify the underlying neural mechanisms of these motivational state dependent decisions, we used the mollusc, Lymnaea stagnalis, whose behaviours have been extensively characterized down to the level of the individual identified neurons that control them. We used a paradigm based on an ambiguous input to establish how hunger state changes the perceived valency of a stimulus (negative/positive). Using behavioural tracking tools, we show that fed animals perceive the stimulus as aversive (avoidance behaviours and inhibition of feeding behaviours) whereas food-deprived animals perceive the same stimulus as a potential food source (approach behaviour and increased feeding initiation). We designed an ex vivo analogue of the decision task which allowed us to simultaneously record the outputs of multiple pattern-generating circuits using targeted intracellular electrophysiology. We show that background levels of inhibition on the feeding and locomotion circuits is shifted by the animal’s hunger state, and that artificially manipulating activity in inhibitory neurons alters the perceived value of the ambiguous stimulus. We suggest that this mechanism allows the animal to alter their perception of stimuli in their environment, maximizing food localization when faced with periods of food deprivation.