After looking into the code of 'pspectrum' I believe I see now how it's calculating power via Matlab signal analyzer.
Documentation for signal analyzer says:
- Divide the signal into equal-length segments. The segments must be short enough that the frequency content of the signal does not change appreciably within a segment. The segments may or may not overlap.
- Window each segment and compute its spectrum to get the short-time Fourier transform.
- Display segment-by-segment the power of each spectrum in decibels. Depict the magnitudes side-by-side as an image with magnitude-dependent colormap.
Which now this makes sense seeing the other options for 'pspectrum' such as 'NumPowerBins' and 'OverlapPercent'. So, thus, it seems periodogram cannot be used to replicate pspectrum but need to use a STFT method. Other useful info can be found here.
Cheers