"Rick likes books from Tufte. Tufte is known for his work on data visualization. Is Rick interested in data visualizations?" (all frontier reasoning models get that right).

-> This qualifies for me as a super simple reasoning task (one reasoning step). From that you can construct arbitrarily more complex context + task definitions (prompts).

Is that "just" statistical pattern matching? I think so. Not sure what humans do, but probably you can implement the same capability in different ways.