Can watching a category watch all its subcategories as well?

[wolftune]

This seems relevant:

Mute category to mute all children categories

Muting sub-categories would very much be the expected behaviour. The way to implement this cleanly (from a user perspective) would be to add a new notification mode to sub-categories called “Inherit from parent” and make this the default. Users could then explicitely set the notification level for sub-categories if they so choose.

But anyway, can I get clarity on the intended situation? There no relation between watch settings for categories and subcategories? They each are changed independently, and only posts directly in the top-level category are affected by its watch settings?