ABSTRACT: Used psychological theories of attention and levels of processing to establish a framework to accommodate the major consumer behavior theories of audience involvement. Four levels of involvement--preattention, focal attention, comprehension, and elaboration--allocate increasing attentional capacity to a message source as needed for 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 levels will be invoked. The higher levels require greater capacity and result in increasingly durable cognitive and attitudinal effects.