> If you posted that challenge to an intelligent person from 20,00 years ago, they would just stare at you blankly.

Depending on how you pose it. If I give you a long enough series of ordered cards, you'll on some basic level begin to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of them. You'll get the intuition that there's a stack of heads scanning the input, moving forward each turn, either growing the mark, falling back, or aborting. If not constrained by using matrices, I can draw you a state diagram, which would have much clearer immediate metaphors than colored squares.

Do these explanations correspond to some priors in human cognition? I suppose. But I don't think you strictly need them for effective few-shot learning. My main point is that learning itself is a skill, which generalist LLMs do possess, but only as one of their competencies.