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The discussions could help to define how officials react to surprises on growth, inflation and hiring in the months ahead

Federal Reserve officials are poised to leave interest rates unchanged at their two-day meeting ending Wednesday, and the debate could center on what it would take for them to move off the sidelines.

The central bank’s two earlier policy meetings this year offered more concrete shifts on its interest rate outlook and plans for its $3.9 trillion asset-portfolio runoff.

This time, the discussions around the boardroom table could help to define how officials would react to positive or negative surprises on growth, inflation and hiring in the months ahead.

The Fed releases a policy statement at 2 p.m. EDT but no new economic projections. This leaves Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference at 2:30 p.m. as the main venue for additional color on any new thinking about the economic and policy outlook. Here are five things to watch:

Look for officials to make only slight changes to their policy statement to reflect stronger-than-expected first-quarter economic growth, which clocked in at a 3.2% annual rate. Firmer economic data has made it easier for officials to maintain their pledge to be “patient” in evaluating where to set rates.

That refrain might grow stale later this year, but for now it appears to have succeeded in signaling an end to the once-a-quarter rate rises the Fed maintained for more than a year. Despite better economic data and buoyant stock markets, it is likely too soon for the Fed to signal any bias toward raising rates. “The stand-pat stance on rates should still dominate,” said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets.

While fears of a sharper growth slowdown have receded, Fed officials face—again—the predicament of weakening in inflation. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, excluding volatile food and energy categories, rose 1.6% in March from a year earlier, down from 1.8% in January and 2% in December.

There’s no single explanation for the weakness, though the deceleration has been concentrated in service-sector prices that aren’t tightly linked to the business cycle, such as health care. Other market-based measures of inflation expectations, on the other hand, are little changed or slightly better than they were when officials met in March.

Inflation is slipping below the Fed’s 2% target at a time when Mr. Powell and other officials have placed greater emphasis on achieving inflation at or even above the target. The Fed says its target is symmetric, meaning that officials are comfortable with inflation rising mildly above or below 2%. In the current expansion, however, inflation has almost always hovered below the target since it was adopted in 2012.

Mr. Powell’s read of the inflation dynamics could offer important cues about what might lead the Fed to maintain or abandon its current “patient” posture.

Officials have signaled this year that the bar to raise rates remains higher than in recent years because of soft inflation. But there has been less clarity about where the bar is for the Fed to cut rates.

Typically, the Fed has cut rates when growth falters and worries about a recession grow. But Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida has pointed recently to two instances in the 1990s in which the Fed cut rates as a precaution, or insurance, against the possibility of such a deterioration in the outlook.

Markets will be highly attuned for signals from Mr. Powell about whether he sees any prospect for the Fed to lower rates if, for example, the weak inflation persists. Roberto Perli, an analyst at Cornerstone Macro, says inconclusive U.S. data, stronger global data, recent stock market gains and political pressure from President Trump to cut rates are obstacles that should prevent Mr. Powell from providing such a clear signal right now.

Recent movements in short-term money markets have again caused the benchmark federal-funds rate to drift closer to the top of its target range between 2.25% and 2.5%. In the past when this has occurred, the Fed has lowered the rate it pays banks on deposits, or reserves, held at the central bank relative to the top of the target range.

The rate of interest on excess reserves is currently set at 2.4%, and market liquidity managers are curious to see if the Fed is prepared to lower the rate, relative to the top of the range, by 0.05 percentage point, as it did twice last year, to keep the fed-funds rate closer to the middle of its target range. Cutting the rate could be tricky for the Fed to explain, however, which is one reason officials would leave this alone for now.

Alternately, officials could debate whether to approve an intermeeting cut in the rate or to devise a new market facility to reduce volatility in reserve demand.

Market volatility, including a big decline in the stock market late last year, encouraged Fed officials to signal they were done lifting interest rates earlier this year. Because markets have since rallied, one question for the Fed is how it regards the potential for easier monetary policy to boost asset prices.

Last year, Mr. Powell repeatedly observed how recent expansions ended with credit bubbles rather than unwanted inflation. In March, he played down concerns that changes in the Fed’s policy stance might ignite a market melt-up like one that followed Fed rate cuts in 1998. Still, with stock markets testing new records, the Fed’s pulse on financial stability concerns looms again.