Is the spiral effect psychological? (Q6172857)

The title of this paper comes from \textit{B. Grünbaum} and \textit{G. C. Shephard} [Tilings and patterns. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company (1987; Zbl 0601.05001), p. 512], in the context of a specific tile. It's not made clear there or here what the ``spiral effect'' is in general, or how ``psychological'' should be defined. Arguably, a purely psychological spiral effect would be in the eye (or visual cortex) of the beholder and incapable of mathematical characterization. A tiling is an \(L\)-tiling if it may be partitioned into N ``arms'' of tiles \(A_{i,j}, 1 \leq i \leq N, j\in \mathbb{N}\) such that \(A_{i,j}\cap A_{i,j+1}\neq \emptyset\) and there exists a polar curve \((r(t),\theta(t))\), monotone and unbounded in \(\theta\), passing through the tiles in order of increasing \(j\). The \(L\) property is very weak, shared (for instance) by the standard checkerboard tiling, and examples of non-\(L\) tilings are not obvious. (It's stated in the paper that the tiling of Figure 9 is not an \(L\)-tiling, but no proof is given.) Indeed, it's plausible that if the coordinate-dependent requirement that \(\theta(t)\) be monotone were dropped, all k-hedral tilings would have the weakened property. An \(S\)-tiling is one with a specified subset of possible tile-tile contact types such the restricted contact graph induces the spiral \(L\)-structure. The main result of this paper is an algorithm that, given a tiling of the plane, finds its arms as an \(S\)-tiling or shows that it does not have this property.