The Oblong Effect

Animals prefer mixtures of length and roundness.

“A death’s-head!” echoed Legrand — ‘Oh — yes — well, it has something of that appearance upon paper, no doubt. The two upper black spots look like eyes, eh? and the longer one at the bottom like a mouth — and then the shape of the whole is oval.’”

— Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold Bug

Topics

∘ Flowers, Fruits, Nuts and Eggs
∘ Oblong Things in Animals
∘ Elongated Cultural Things
∘ Sensory Bias Versus Adaptation
∘ Aesthetic Interactions
∘ Works Cited

A universal sensory bias favoring oblong things is probably responsible for human and animal decorations being, very often, not too long, not too short, not quite spherical or square, but elongated somewhat along one dimension, and more often than should be expected by chance with no obvious corresponding advantage to explain it practically beyond an intrinsic appeal to the senses.

Being oblong instead of perfectly round probably makes an object look more complex, familiar and likable to an animal. The effect can be seen generally in the shapes of aesthetic objects in human culture, the shapes of animals and their parts, and those of…