Lindsay graduated from Reed College in 1981 with a BA in psychology. After a brief period working as a construction labourer in Anchorage, Alaska, he began postgraduate study at Princeton in 1983; his doctoral work was supervised by well-known memory researcher Marcia Johnson. In his dissertation he initially set out to investigate the impact of imagining contrary-to-truth hiding places on children’s memory for the actual spatial location of objects.

Lindsay became a faculty member at UVic in 1991, previously teaching at Williams College and completing a post-doctoral fellowship with Larry Jacoby at McMaster University.

Lindsay has achieved recognition in his field. He has published scores of journal articles, edited or co-edited several books and contributed chapters to many edited volumes. He was awarded the American Psychological Association Young Investigator Award in Experimental Psychology in 1995, served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from 2001 to 2007, became a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2005, received the University of Victoria Faculty of Social Science's Teaching Excellence award in 2006, and is currently Editor in Chief of Psychological Science.