As an undergraduate Lennie attended the University of Hull, England, and graduated in 1969 with first class honors in psychology.
His subsequent career as a neuroscientist dealt principally with the function of the early stages of vision, from the retina to primary visual cortex.
It focused particularly on how the successive stages of analysis encode and represent information about the form and color of objects Lennie was lecturer in experimental psychology at the University of Sussex from 1976 to 1982, when he moved to the University of Rochester as associate professor, then professor of psychology.
Lennie provided fundamental insights into the neural machinery of vision, especially how the eye communicates with the brain.
[1] He concentrated particularly on how the successive stages of the visual pathway from the eye and the brain's cortex encode and represent information about the form and color of objects.