The effectiveness of advertising messages is widely believed to be moderated by audtence involvement. In this paper, psychological theories ot attention and levels of processing ate used to establish a framework that can accommodate the major consumer behavior theories of audience involvement. Four levels o' involvement are identified (in order from low to high) as prealtention. focal attention, comprehension, and elaboration. These levels allocate increasing attentional capacity to a message source, as needed tor analysis of the message by increasingly abstract—and qualitatively distinct—representational systems Lower levels use relatively little capacity and extract information needed to determine whether higher leva's will be invoked. The higher levels require greater capacity and result in increasingly durable cognilrve and attitudinal effects.