That's not negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is when behavior is reinforced by removing an aversive stimulus. Yelling at a cat because it's scratching the couch is positive punishment [1].
And punishment works quite differently from reinforcement to begin with; it is typically less effective for far better socialized species such as humans and dogs, too.
Domestic cats have been domesticated for a long time. Cats which live with humans (or even other cats - they do naturally form colonies) adopt a number of pro-social behaviours to interact with us.
They are in fact very adept at reading social cues - but conversely they are not pack-animals. They don't have the same instinctive need to identify a hierarchy of command, so much as "mess with" and "don't mess with".
How do you think domestic cats came into existence? Prosocial behavior and tolerance of humans are traits that are equal parts nature and nurture in cats. Obviously current housecats are descended from those wild cats that were more accepting of human presence and had traits that made them accepted by humans as well. Still, individual cats must learn to interact with humans, and if they aren't habituated to human presence during the first couple of months of their lifes, they end up very different psychologically compared to if they are.
The domestication of dogs happened a lot longer ago, and probably a lot more organically (more like what you're thinking). The wolves would follow us around while we hunted (or, alternatively, we'd happen on one of their meals and chase them off), and the less human averse among them got more food.
Cats happened about the same time agriculture did. They were attracted to the rodents, and less rodents meant we were happier - and they were happier with a reliable food source. At the beginning it might have helped to not be afraid of humans, but we probably didn't mess with them too much because they were helping us out with all the mice in our grains.
So the difference in behavior is clear, not just from a social species standpoint, but from the domestication path:
The European Wolf was domesticated to dogs as a hunting partner; the African Wildcat was domesticated to kill the rodents that devoured our foodstuffs. For the few few thousand years that was probably enough - they didn't have to make friends with us, just keep our food safe.
Earliest cat domestication evidence is 9,500 years old; earliest dog domestication evidence is about 36,000 years old.
They've still got quite a ways to go ;) Now if we could just start breeding them for social/intelligence instead of how weird and fluffy we can make them. Hard to morally advocate for breeding when the shelter/feral population is so damn high, though. (I feel the same way about dogs, though, tbh).
I questioned artificial selection (breeding), you replied with natural selection (increased reproductive success by adopting to living near humans). Briefly skimming some sources, we are both correct http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702791/#__sec6t...
Do you suggest the presence of humans reduces the reproductive success of non-domesticated cats? Otherwise, how do you understand evolutionary pressure?
Presence of humans increases the reproductive success of domesticated cats (because they get supplemental food and shelter and protection from predators), and decreases the success of non-domesticated cats (because humans are happy to kill antisocial feral cats).
Do you honestly think that some agricultural community hundreds of years ago had nothing better to do than hunt down anti-social cats? It's speculation, and sources suggest the opposite is true, the cats were were simply tolerated: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702791/#__sec6t...
Increase of reproductive success is not an evolutionary pressure and is irrelevant in the context of the comment I was replying to.
I didn't say they "hunted them down," I said they were happy to kill them.
And increase of reproductive success of a very similar population puts all kinds of evolutionary pressure on the less-advantaged population, as they compete for the same things. But more to the point, regardless of the exact words that your parent poster used, they clearly did not mean a very narrow definition of evolutionary pressure.
To be fair it is only in the last 200 years that teenage boys were not working harder than we can even imagine. Take a look at the 'workhouses' in the UK at the start of the industrial revolution. Children worked and worked hard. There was no time for frivolity. People died young and it was hard to put food on the table. If anything cats, feral or not would be happily hunted for a little extra meat.
Punishment also works on cats. You just have to be very consistent when applying it (this is exactly the same for dogs). If you punish your cat(or dog) you have to do it immediately. If the cat is done scratching its nails, and you squirt water, you are too late.
[Edit] Changed negative reinforcement to punishment, rbehrends was correct when he pointed out that negative reinforcement is something different.
The issue (which the article explained badly) isn't that punishment doesn't work; it's that cats don't understand human social cues.
For a dog, yelling is a punishment on its own, because they understand what the tone of voice means. A cat will just think "hmm, the human got louder - I wonder why?" If you're trying to punish a cat for things, you either need a physical stimulus they don't like (spray bottle, for example) or a social cue they understand (hissing is moderately effective, though that's more of a warning than a punishment).
Well, positive reinforcement is better than negative reinforcement because instead of presenting yourself as an unpredictable angry ape, you're presenting yourself as a source of treats, which is better. Who cares why the cat is getting treats?
I thought the same thing. I hate that any comment on a HN post adds to it's score. I would like this comment counted as a negative. This article is terrible.
[...]
“How the hell is your cat supposed to know that you’re yelling at him because you want him to stop scratching the couch?”
[...]
"When your cat does the thing you want her do to, reward her with a treat, or affection."
If we accept that cats can't learn from negative reinforcement, why would we think that positive reinforcement would work?