<i> With Toys for Infants, a Trend Is Plain to See </i>

In the world of infants, black and white is hot. Pastels are a bore.

Yuppie parents are reconsidering buying their infants tan teddy bears and pink bunnies. Instead, they’re snapping up pandas, zebras or any other black-and-white toy in sight.

Today some newborns can’t blink without seeing mobiles, diaper bags, strollers, bottles, quilts and stuffed animals--all decorated in black and white.

“It’s . . . the hip baby toys,” said Tiffany Pilato of Joys and Toys on Melrose Avenue. “Everybody that I’ve ever seen loves them, especially in Los Angeles. Everybody loves black and white.”

It all began innocently enough in the 1950s when Robert L. Fantz, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, discovered that infants in their first few months preferred looking at high-contrast images in black and white. Follow-up studies by numerous university researchers, including Susan Ludington-Hoe, associate professor of maternal child nursing at UCLA, also have shown that babies can’t begin appreciating other colors until they are 6 to 9 months old.

“Newborn infants are fascinated by black-and-white contrast, not by all those lovely little pictures of Donald Duck and Jack and Jill going up the hill,” Ludington-Hoe wrote several years ago in a professional journal widely circulated among nurses.

But the news never traveled far. For years, true believers mostly were confined to childbirth educators and nurses in maternity wards, who would draw black designs on white paper and tape them to cribs of newborns and incubators of premature infants.

Until recently no one apparently bothered to explore whether this inside secret could be mass-marketed.

Many of the black-and-white toys on the market today can be traced to two women who got started in the business by slowly chipping away at parents’ considerable skepticism.

Susan Vincent, a neonatal nurse at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, founded TOT, or Turn on Toys, four years ago after sewing stuffed zebras for her friends’ newborns.

Today, her company produces a milk bottle decorated with Holstein cows, plastic graphic cards, a menagerie of small stuffed animals and a toy checkered cab--a big seller in Manhattan.

Ruth Wimmer, formerly director of therapeutic recreation at Children’s Hospital in Denver, got her start six years ago when she began making black-and-white toys for her first child while pregnant. Her daughter loved them. “I thought either this is just my baby or there is something to it,” she recalled.

When other infants gurgled and cooed at the homemade toys, she switched careers. The company she founded with her husband now has mobiles hanging in 1,000 hospitals scattered across the United States and Canada.

In Los Angeles, Ann Klafter, a computer programmer, had read about the black-and-white theories. She then experimented with many types of infant stimulation on her daughter, including black and white. She draped a black-and-white shirt or a checkered robe over her daughter’s crib and drew stark pictures for her. “I think she liked it. It’s hard to say, but I felt good doing it,” said Klafter, who serenaded her 20-month-old with classical music before birth.

Some experts warn that newborns can overdose on lightning bolts, checker boards and other bold black-and-white graphics.

“You can overdo a good thing,” cautioned Robert Duckman, an optometry professor at the State University of New York, who has been researching infant vision for the past decade. “While it is a good stimulation technique, (black and white) can and has been overdone.

“Making everything black and white in a child’s world is not something I would consider a positive, healthy approach because the world is not black and white,” Duckman added. “The world is not a constant high-level stimulation.”

An infant should be exposed to black-and-white toys for not more than 20 minutes at a time, suggested Duckman, who advocates banishing black-and-white sheets from the bedroom to allow infants to slip into slumber peacefully.

As for those popular pastel and other colored toys and baby items, they can be given to infants but they probably really appreciate them only later, experts said, adding their research on this perceptual issue is still ongoing.

Ludington-Hoe--author of “How to Have a Smarter Baby,” and the creator of a line of deluxe infant toys for Vulli, a French company--agrees that parents should not completely immerse a baby in a two-color nursery.

But when infants tire of looking at black and white, they simply will turn away, said the UCLA professor, who taught actress Cybill Shepherd how to use black-and-white toys with her twins.

Parents can invest in the black-and-white craze with just a black magic marker or several hundred dollars.

Bellini Juvenile Designer Furniture, an upscale baby store on Ventura Boulevard, for instance, carries a zebra crib set--with sheet, quilt, crib bumpers, pillow and dust ruffle--for $610.

At nearby Baby Toytown 4 Babys Only, where the store’s most popular stroller is a pricey black-and-white model, the latest trend also is well entrenched. But store manager Annette Hamilton suspects the phenomenon has more to do with aesthetics.

“I think a lot of it is fashion,” Hamilton said. “They (parents) like the look of it.”

But nobody is predicting that pandas or Dalmatians will steal the teddy bear’s honored spot in the crib. Frankly, only an infant could appreciate some of these toys, which to some might look downright ugly.

Grandmothers rank among the most stubborn skeptics. As toy advocate Vincent described it: “I do have to appeal to the grandmothers in society who are going to walk up to the crib and say, ‘OOOHH! What are you doing to that child!’ ”