Abstract Responding to internal goals and filtering irrelevant environmental cues is essential for adapted behavior. To better understand their phylogenetic evolution, we explored the underlying mechanisms in rats, thanks to the adaptation of a well-established conflict task in Humans. Besides mean performance, state of the art data analysis based on distribution analysis and formal modeling (diffusion model adapted to conflict tasks that proved very powerful in Humans) revealed mechanisms similar to the ones observed in human adults, grounding any theoretical explanation into an evolutionary perspective. Besides, the dynamics of the underlying processes in this simple conflict task resembles the ones observed in human children performing a more challenging conflict task, including the tendency to loose goals. The present study bridges the gap between onto- and phylo-genetic development of cognitive control, opening new perspectives to understand both their functional and neural implementation.