Importance of electrophysiological signal features assessed by classification trees

Sustained activity in prefrontal cortex is associated with the maintenance of information during short-term memory (STM). We have used impurity reduction criteria of classification trees to investigate how the behavioral performance of a monkey during STM is reflected in the information content of three features of recorded signals: rates of individual neurons, oscillations in the LFP, and oscillations in the spiking activity. The LFP power in all bands, but in the @a and @b bands in particular, is more informative than the firing rate of neurons and the spike power with respect to the monkey's performance.