Enhanced cognitive ability is beneficial in unpredictable and harsh environments, as it enables animals to respond with flexibility. For animals living in urbanized areas, local environments not only are altered but can rapidly change during their lifetime. Urban residents are therefore challenged with identifying novel dangers and safe refuges in dynamic environments. We demonstrate that the tropical agamid lizard Psammophilus dorsalis experiences dramatically different habitats not only across the rural to urban spatial scale but also over the short temporal scale of a few years in suburban areas. Differences in environmental stability are expected to affect rates of learning and reversal learning in resident lizards. In testing arenas, lizards from these populations were required to choose a designated ‘safe’ refuge instead of an ‘unsafe’ one after simulated predator attacks. The contingency for safety was switched during the reversal learning task. In general, P. dorsalis showed high rates of learning and reversal learning, but lizards from suburban areas were quicker to learn and unlearn the location of the safe refuge than those from rural areas. This demonstrates for the first time to our knowledge that suburban lizards have faster learning and reversal learning skills for a key survival-related behaviour, finding safety in unpredictable environments.

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Young adults entering college experience immense shifts in personal and professional environments. Such a potentially stressful event may trigger multiple psychological and physiological effects. In a repeated-measures longitudinal survey (N = 6 time-points) of first year cohort of residential undergraduate students in India, this study evaluates multiple psychological parameters: PSS14 (Perceived Stress Scale), K10 (distress scale) and positive mood measures, along with salivary cortisol levels. We find that compared to women, men showed significantly lower levels of salivary cortisol and also a decrease in perceived stress (PSS14) and distress (K10) with time. By contrast, women reported similar perceived stress and distress levels over time but had higher cortisol levels at the end of the academic year. Academic stress was reported by the students to be the most important stressor. This study highlights notable gender-/sex-differences in psychological and physiological stress responses and adds a valuable longitudinal dataset from the Indian undergraduate student cohort which is lacking in literature.