Diminished motivation or interest in participating in everyday activities is one symptom of depression. It is also a prominent symptom of sickness behavior in response to an immune challenge. Interestingly, approximately half of all individuals with depression show elevated circulating inflammatory responses. The goal of the present study is to investigate how inflammatory responses affect exploratory behavior in a rat model. Rats were either injected with saline or E. coli, then exploratory behavior was recorded in an open-field test. Brains were collected to quantify the activation of neural pathways. We hypothesized that inflammatory responses following E. coli administration would activate neural pathways involved in sickness behaviors but inhibit neural pathways involved in motivation and reward.